Thanks to Owen Jones, in today’s Graun, for drawing my attention to a nasty little piece in the present edition of Socialist Worker. SW was once essential (and – believe it or not – entertaining) reading on the left, even for those of us who had little time for the SWP’s politics. But I haven’t bought a copy since September 2001 and so very rarely get to read it.

Above: Prof Callinicos, privately educated scion of the ruling class

For those of you who can’t be arsed to follow the link above, the article is entitled ‘Eton by Bear? The inquest begins,’ a supposedly ‘humorous’ take on the death of Horatio Chapple, mauled to death by a polar bear while on a trip to the Svalbard archipelago of Norway.

What makes the death of Chapple suitable material for SWP chortling is, it seems, the fact that he was a posh boy who went to Eton.

There was a time when I might have joined in with the sniggering, but I well remember being admonished over this by a senior comrade (himself of unimpeachable working class credentials) who told me, “socialism is about doing away with the idea that people’s worth should be judged by an accident of birth – and that applies just as much to workerism on the left as it does to mainstream society’s fawning before the aristocracy.” He was surely right, and I’ve never forgotten it – or the shame I felt at having to have such an elementary point explained to me.

Socialist Worker’s unpleasant sniggering over the death of this young man is all the more bizarre and distasteful when you consider the upper class, public school backgrounds of so many of their leading comrades, past and present – not least head honcho Callinicos, who (according to Wikipedia) “was educated at St George’s College, Salisbury (now Harare) … [and] … first became involved in revolutionary politics as a student at Balliol College, Oxford, from which he received his BA.”

Even more importantly, SW‘s gloating over this horrible death tells us a lot about the kind of “socialism” that this degenerate organisation now represents. Jones usefully reminds us of the words of Peter Fryer, the Daily Worker (forerunner of the Morning Star) journalist who resigned from the Communist Party of Britain after they suppressed his sympathetic coverage of the 1956 Hungarian revolution. Fryer was describing the Stalinist CP, but his words equally well apply to the nominally “Trotskyist” SWP of today:

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3 Comments

ted edwardssaid,

Owen Jones is clearly correct in hi lighting such a mean and cruel article but he somehow irritates me in spouting off all the time about the hardships of the working class and yet he himself has clearly had the benefit of being brought up by middle class parents and even went to Oxford. When I see more council house kids going to Oxford then I might actually listen to him.

There is a certain set of people who seem to be hated equally by the Left and Right – by the Left as “slummers”, by the Right as “class traitors” (or at least they *were*: these days the Telegraph will defend people it would once have called class traitors if they make enough money).

I’ve always thought the Left should, on the whole and taking each case as it comes, defend these people – have got into more than one nasty fight over it, as you might imagine.